Just over a month ago I bought my first Mac – a 13″ MacBook Pro. As a long-time user of Microsoft products, and vocal opponent of Mac evangelists, I thought it would be a good idea to approach this with an open mind, and for me to blog my experiences and thoughts.
Over the last few years, a number of minds I respect have moved to OSX, and claim it’s superior to Windows in many ways. Thinking they can’t all be wrong, and wanting to try some iPhone development, I thought it was time to bite the bullet and get a Mac.
At first, everything worked beautifully, and I was rather hooked. However, since installing Snow Leopard, I’ve been plagued with problems; at first the current application would freeze, and clicking on other ones would cause those to freeze too, and I’d be left watching the spinning beachball of busyness. After a minute or so the system would suddenly start working again. Then two days ago, the machine wouldn’t wake up, and I was left staring at either a grey screen, a grey screen with an apple, a grey screen with an apple and frozen spinning thing, or at a blue screen with a cursor. If you follow me on Twitter, you’ll be more than aware of these problems.
After trying various suggestions I managed to get it working again by formatting the disk, then installing Snow Leopard. Everything was fine for a day of use, but then this morning it’s decided that Time Machine can’t backup any more, and while it’s failing to do that, all of my open applications stop responding.
It looks like it’s probably a hardware problem, so I’ll take it back to the store tomorrow, and ask for a refund. If I was a less patient man I wouldn’t bother trying again, but I realise that I’ve had a ‘bad apple’ so to speak.
I hope that I’ll be in possession of a working Mac soon, and be able to write down some thoughts without them being sullied by what has been, quite frankly, a complete waste of my time.
I leave you now with a video and a few photos…
Blog post: Whinge whinge whinge
http://bit.ly/18zG17
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
By the sound of it you do have a bad Apple by the sounds of it. I’ve used Windoze, Linux and OSX/Mac at home and to be honest I do much prefer the OSX experience. At risk of drawing flames from Linux fanboys it is like using Linux/Unix but with a decent user interface.
I’ve had three computers that I’ve had to get the repair man out to (and Evesham PC and a Dell PC) and an Asus netbook. In all cases there were hardware faults that caused things to hang, crash etc. So I couldn’t really blame Windoze for my Dell’s dodgy RAM or my Evesham’s dodgy hard drive…or blame Linux for whatever was wrong with my Asus.
Sadly like you I did waste a lot of time trying to get the things working before conceding it was a hardware issue.. I hope you’re next Apple works and would be interested to hear you thoughts on OSX after using a working Mac. Good luck!
All you’ve got there is a faulty hard drive. Which Apple don’t make. It’s bad luck, but not a result of poor engineering or lack of testing by Apple. It was probably dropped by the delivery company en-route to the shop – it happens…
Probably yeah. However at Genius bar there were additional problems which they said suggest possible logic board problems.
And yeah, not the fault of Apple. These things happen. In fact Apple have been pretty good really.